Large amount of temp files slows down JasperReports Server to unusable

Issue:

We observer that there is a large number of temp files being created and remaining in directory xxx. Over a day 300.000 to 800.000 files remain in the temp directory (per day! We purge the temp files every night).

We suspect that this causes (directly or indirectly) severe performance impacts and other strange behavours (e.g. same report is being emailed several times - same reports 16 times over 4 hrs.) making the system unusable (login takes 20min). Once we bring down Jasper/Tomcat and purge all tempfiles the system is ok again (if we restart tomcat only - no temp file purge) the situation stays poor.

Sometimes we do not survive a business day and have to restart Japser over the day causing not acceptable interruptions!

Why does Japser not remove it's tempfiles properly? What can be done?

Technical Details

Resolution:

This problem may be caused by some report going into infinite loop which results in huge amount of virt files. Can you try adding the following property in your /WEB-INF/classes/jasperreports.properties file:

net.sf.jasperreports.governor.max.pages.enabled=true

net.sf.jasperreports.governor.max.pages=[arbitrary integer]

Replace arbitrary integer with a maximum number of pages after which the report will be considered to hit infinite loop and it's execution will be terminated. Try entering a big number, marginally bigger than your biggest reports usually produce.

When report hits the limit of the governor you should first of all check whether there are any overflows and stretches with overflow in report. Usually this results in endless cycles.

Ref. Case #00025731 -- 16:23, 26 June 2012 (UTC)